Since becoming quite addicted to The West Wing television series, I’ve been finding it easier and easier to bring my laptop to bed with me to watch episodes of my favorite television shows as I fall asleep. Unfortunately, this has been slowly displacing my life-long routine of reading before bed and I’m feeling a bit, well, guilty.

For some reason I suspect that the X-Files, Star Trek:TNG and Red Dwarf just do not stack up - in the good-for-personal-betterment sense - against the usual diet of philosophy and science reading to which I’m accustom. Sure, I’ve been able to catch up on all the episodes of QI - and that has to count for something - but even ingesting the wisdom of the comics has left this lingering feeling that I’ve somehow become lazy.

Click here for stunning video of Airic’s_arm.

As a young boy who obsessively read the ads in the back of Popular Science and relentlessly sent in those cardboard “for more information” cards, my mailbox (the physical one!) was always filled with product marketing from countless engineering and technology companies. One of the more interesting products to me at the time was NITINOL, the nickel-titanium shape memory alloy developed by the Naval Ordnance Laboratory.

Having read the NITINOL literature and having a huge preoccupation with robotics and artificial intelligence, my young mind often thought that the best way to make a human-like android with human-like movement would be to – obviously – model it on a human! I had childhood dreams of bundling NITINOL wires together into muscle groups, fastening them together onto a bone structure and making a truly human android.

Regular readers may be wondering where the entire roderickrussell.com domain and all of its subdomains went this past week and a half. Here’s the story:

As I sit writing this article – surprisingly at my kitchen table for once and not an obscure cafe or bookstore in a far-flung location – I am experiencing a complete communications meltdown. My primary email is down, my cell phone is busted and I’ve had to resort to a backup address and the woes of Skype. In truth, my Skype experience hasn’t been bad at all, but my attitude is, shall we say, in the toilet since my domain name was stolen – yes, stolen.

How, you may be asking, was my domain stolen? A combination of registrar error and an unscrupulous cybersquatter is to blame, and it all begins with Namesecure – a misnomer if I’ve ever heard one.

I’m very excited to report that the filming of the new indie short Cupcake has wrapped, editing is complete and the film is off to it’s next destination. Though I am not at liberty to divulge any more at this time, there will be an announcement made here on this site when the time is appropriate.

I was invited to participate in the film by writer and director Cheryl Cambras, and after exploring the script - and being stunned at the uniqueness of the project - thought that this decidedly bizarre film would be a good match.

Cheryl invited me to take part and to play - um - shall we say a pivotal role in my capacity as a sword swallower. We met in Stamford, Connecticut on the 28th of July and work commenced with the fantastic cast and crew.